VIDAL (loftily): As far as I’m concerned, the only pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that—SMITH (moderator): Let’s, let’s not call names—VIDAL: Failing that, I can only say that—BUCKLEY (teeth bared, snarling): Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face, and you’ll stay plastered—

It was a case of the seven-second delay, or lack thereof. ABC News hired William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal to debate the 1968 presidential nominating conventions in real time on live TV as a way of classing up its coverage. The argument got heated, epithets were exchanged, and the above infamous interchange was broadcast uncensored because no profanity delay was in place.

My columns covering the current state of American electoral politics have a built-in delay, not to prevent obscenity, but as a consequence of this magazine’s print cycle. Prompted by the film Best of Enemies, I’m writing this column in December for an early January deadline in MRR #394, March 2016. I lay out the columns section, including my own, by the end of January, which is the last moment I can make changes to the text. By the time issue #394 gets into your grubby little hands, this column will be over a month out of date, and maybe closer to three. So much for up-to-the-minute electoral coverage and timely political analysis.

The seven-second delay has become ever more ubiquitous, even as the internet has done an end run around censorship in all mainstream media. By tacit agreement, every major and most minor media outlets quickly censored the broadcast, print, and digital images of the Bataclan’s blood soaked dance floor after the terrorist attack of 11-13-15. Yet it’s easy to find the original uncensored picture online. In 1968, when Buckley and Vidal exchanged their insults, they were seriously upstaged by the rancorous floor fights within the Democratic National Convention as well as the carnage of Chicago police run riot outside the Convention. ABC News allowing Buckley to drop the “q-bomb” on live TV was the least of the network’s problems, what with journalists getting beaten up by cops in the streets of Chicago and their contentious, often lurid visuals making the news on TV and in daily papers. By contrast, the well-oiled Republican National Convention earlier in August nominated Richard Nixon on a strict law-and-order platform. The GOP’s appearance of firmness, reasonableness and stability in the face of Chicago’s chaos helped earn Nixon his landslide victory.

Today, we’re faced with the reverse.

The Democratic National Convention (July 25-28) looks to be a snooze, with Hillary the foregone nominee and Bernie promising not to buck the party process. The Republican National Convention (July 18-21) has all the makings of a good old donnybrook, a full-fledged political melee, thanks to Trump’s candidacy. There’s talk of a split convention with a nasty floor fight over who to nominate. The old-white-male GOP establishment is thinking about brokering the convention, with Trump and Carson threatening to jump ship. Simply put, the Republicans are clusterfucked.

If Trump is nominated, he will lose to Hillary. Most observers agree that the Republicans will lose big time, on a par with Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964. If Trump loses the nomination and bolts the Republican Party with an independent presidential candidacy, the GOP will split, and both the party and Trump will lose. This is the Ross Perot Third Party scenario, and it holds to a lesser degree for Carson. The only way that the Republicans have even a chance of winning against Hillary would be if Trump loses the nomination, gracefully accepts the GOP’s decision and throws his full weight behind the party’s nomination. Not fucking likely. Any way you look at it, the Republicans will be bruised and bloodied at the very least, but more likely irreparably splintered into warring factions. In turn, the GOP’s efforts to remain viable are seriously threatened because the unity and respectability of the conservative movement underlying it has completely unraveled.

Tim Yohannan marshaled MRR’s shitworkers into keeping this magazine running after he was diagnosed with terminal non-Hodgkins lymphoma. No, Tim never promised Mykel Board a columnist position in perpetuity, and yes, he wanted to give MRR to George Tabb who turned it down because he couldn’t figure out how to move the magazine to New York City. For Tim Yo, the single most important characteristic of someone capable of running MRR was being an asshole when required, with the ability to make the hard decisions—like firing columnist Jeff Bale or refusing ads from Caroline Records because of their major label involvement or even pulling out of Mordam Records because Mordam was no longer punk enough—and to take the heat for making them.

But there are assholes, and then there are assholes.

Gavin McInnis argues that “Trump is crass and rude and irrational [and an asshole], but that’s what we need. We need hate. We need fear mongering.” Trump supporters are more than willing to see the GOP crash and burn in order for Trump to win. “The Republicans are pussies,” according to McInnis, and if they can’t get behind a Trump nomination, they deserve to lose. It’s not because clowns like McIinnis have no skin in the political game as a new Canadian immigrant recently turned American citizen. Younger Republicans and youthful conservatives are simply no longer willing to abide by Buckley’s dictum to: “Nominate the most conservative candidate who is electable,” or Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment that: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.” They’re prepared to hold onto their conservative principles and make their point come hell or high water, even if it means trashing their fellow Republicans, wrecking the GOP, and destroying the conservative movement.

In supporting a conservative asshole like Trump, a younger generation of 30-to-40-something conservatives is ignoring the legacy of yet another conservative asshole, William F. Buckley, Jr. National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg praised Buckley for employing “intellectual ruthlessness and relentless personal charm to keep that which is good about libertarianism, what we have come to call ‘social conservatism,’ and what was necessary about anti-Communism in the movement. This meant throwing friends and allies off the bus from time to time. The Randians, the Rothbardian anarchists and isolationists, the Birchers, the anti-Semites, the me-too Republicans: all of these groups in various combinations were purged from the movement and masthead, sometimes painfully, sometimes easily, but always with the ideal of keeping the cause honest and pointed north to the ideal in his compass.” (NR Online, 10-27-05) Buckley relentlessly purged the conservative movement with the excuse of ridding it of anti-Semites and wingnut conspiracy theorists. According to Paul Gottfried however, Buckley’s “victims became ‘wing nuts’ by virtue of having been purged and slandered. The purges were not a passing or merely ancillary aspect of conservatism; they were a defining characteristic of a movement, whose function was to stake out ground where the Left had been the moment before.” Gottfried calls this Buckley’s “Great Purge” in service of building, maintaining and defending a respectable “Conservatism, Inc.”

But the GOP’s many tendencies and factions were never purged and the conservative movement was never purified. After arch-conservatives took control of the 1964 Republican National Convention to nominate Goldwater for his disastrous presidential run, Goldwater’s conservative base was decimated. Moderate-to-liberal Republicans like Nixon and Rockefeller gained ascendency, but the GOP’s conservative wing did not evaporate. Instead, these conservatives went underground and grassroots, organizing from the base up until they elected Reagan in 1980 for eight years of neoliberal dominance. Moderate Republicans are now endangered, and the liberal ones extinct. Today, conservative tendencies and factions abound; not just Randians, Rothbardian anarchists and isolationists, Birchers, anti-Semites, and me-too Republicans, but also Tea Partiers and neoliberals, white nationalists and supremacists, New Rightists, AltRightists and neo-reactionaries, evangelicals, paleoconservatives, neoconservatives and social conservatives, lone wolves and conspiracy nuts, libertarians and Establishment Republicans, yada, yada, yada. Is it any wonder that Trump’s candidacy has prompted the GOP to come apart at the seams and the conservative movement to descend into internecine warfare?

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a bad thing, the GOP going down in flames. Hilarious, in fact. I just wish there was some equivalent, serious opposition in the Democratic Party and the wider progressive movement to the juggernaut that is Hillary, Inc. Of course, Bernie will make a valiant primary effort at the Democratic National Convention, but he will lose and just as valiantly accede to the party’s nominee. Maybe Black Lives Matter will stage some level of protest inside or outside the convention, but I don’t see mass leftie protests targeting the Democrats anytime soon. And much as I like an acrimonious, bare-knuckled, equal brawl, that’s not likely to happen either. My prediction at this point in the print cycle is that Ted Cruz will be nominated by the Republicans, but Trump will only grudgingly step aside. With the GOP at less than full strength, Hillary will win the presidency.

Great! Four more years of Republican whining and right-of-center Democratic gloating and nothing ever getting done. If the GOP survives, that is. American politics are so fucking lame and unsurprising. A Public Policy Poll recently asked: “Would you support or oppose bombing Agrabah?” Of the Republicans who responded 57% were not sure, 13% opposed it, and 30% said they supported it. When it came to Democrats 55% were not sure, 36% opposed bombing Agrabah, and 19% said they supported it. Agrabah is the mythical kingdom in the 1992 Disney movie Aladdin.

Put together by J. Hughes for the Democratic Socialists of America, and hosted by their website for a time, this is a copy of the original posting which seems to have disappeared from the worldwide web aside from this right-wing reprint. All hyperlinks have been deleted and dubious text links redacted. The information here is sometimes simplistic, inaccurate and outdated, but it can serve as a starting point for more in-depth political discussions:

I’m a nerd, absolutely no question. From Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp paperbacks as a kid and Star Trek beginning season 1, episode 1 in my adolescence, I’ve been fascinated with all things astronomical and SciFi. Leave it to NASA then to do something very cool and mint 14 space travel posters for the solar system and near Milky Way galaxy. Here’s fantasizing I one day collect all the destination stickers on my luggage represented by these posters.

In New York City, its a bodega on every corner. In LA, its corner liquor stores. Here in San Francisco, its the corner grocery store which, unfortunately, is being threatened by rampant gentrification.

We live in an already upscale part of the City, between Noe and Eureka Valleys. Two blocks down from our house, an old funky grocery store (no fresh fruits or vegetables, just canned or packaged food items, often with expired dates, plus the usual alcohol) gave up the ghost several years ago. This allowed four local entrepreneurs to take over the empty space and do a soft-story earthquake retrofit in addition to overall improvements.

The resulting business is part coffee shop/ice cream bar/prepared food store/event and class location/commercial popup/neighborhood hangout. And its been successful from the start. They’ve scheduled a class on the “Art & Science of Saving Bees, Birds & Trees,” and host boutique flower arranging by the FloraCultural Society on weekends.

Ryan and Laurel can often be found preparing gourmet coffees and teas or serving Laurel’s sweet and savory pastries. And people do what they usually do in San Francisco coffee shops, set up their laptops for long sessions of work and play online. Neighbor’s Corner is bright and airy, with a modern bathroom to boot.

The previous store owner left quite mysteriously and was unable to pass on the location’s liquor licenses to the new owners. Now the new owners are working through the lengthy city permit process to allow for regular coffee shop occupancy and patronage during business hours. Given the enthusiastic response from the residents, Neighbor’s Corner looks like it’s here to stay.

A woman holds up a pair of signs as police look on during a protest to demand city officials do more to help homeless people outside Super Bowl City, a pro-football’s weeklong theme park near the famed Ferry Building in San Francisco on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2016. Dozens protested what they say is San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee’s plan to push homeless people out of the scenic bay-front Embarcadero, where Super Bowl festivities are being held. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

As the host of this weekend’s Super Bowl, San Francisco has spared no expense, erecting a huge “Super Bowl City” compound for the event.

This perceived excess angered homeless advocates in the Bay Area, a few hundred of whom protested at the compound on Wednesday afternoon, according to KTVU. They asked the city to spend more money on its thousands of homeless residents.

“You can spend $5 million on a big half time party. You can spend $5 million on a big show. But you can’t feed homeless people?” asked a protestor named Joshua Shrader, according to Time.

The protesters set up a “tent city” outside the Super Bowl City compound and were fairly orderly. The organizers, led by the Coalition on Homelessness, met with police to set its parameters beforehand, according to SF Gate. They called for San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee to invest $5 million, the approximate cost of the Super Bowl, in housing and social services for homeless people.

The city has been accused of moving homeless people out of sight to keep up appearances before the Super Bowl. In response, city officials say they are only trying to help the homeless during severe El Niño rains.

“Our only goal is to help people in out of the rain, and it has nothing to do with the Super Bowl,” Trent Rhorer, head of the city’s Human Services Agency, told SF Gate.

But Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, told Time that homeless people are being illegally searched, cleared from encampments, and ticketed for arbitrary offenses like “sitting or lying.”

By the protest’s end, many homeless people left to find places to sleep for the night, according to SF Gate. One 61-year-old homeless woman, Cynthia Lee, told the news outlet, “I think if San Francisco has money to throw at the Super Bowl — even if it brings in tax money — they should give us places to live.”

]]>https://gamatiasz.com/2016/02/07/repost-fuck-the-super-bowl/feed/0gamatiaszRepost Playing For KeepsA woman holds up a pair of signs as police look on during a protest to demand city officials do more to help homeless people outside Super Bowl City, a pro-football's weeklong theme park near the famed Ferry Building in San Francisco on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2016. Dozens protested what they say is San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee's plan to push homeless people out of the scenic bay-front Embarcadero, where Super Bowl festivities are being held. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)REPOST: Aroma Tea Shophttps://gamatiasz.com/2016/02/04/repost-aroma-tea-shop/
https://gamatiasz.com/2016/02/04/repost-aroma-tea-shop/#respondThu, 04 Feb 2016 23:41:21 +0000http://gamatiasz.com/?p=131

I can’t imagine how I missed this place until now.

Aroma Tea is a quirky—inside and out—tea shop on 6th Avenue in the Inner Richmond. The owners are eccentric yet extremely knowledgeable, traveling often to China to select and buy the teas they sell.

It’s “all tea all the time” here, with the varieties of tea in wildly packaged tins. The selection is outstanding; black/red, oolong, jasmine, green, white, pu-erh, even herbal. They have daily tea tasting during business hours where you can sample the teas you wish to buy, which also means looking over and smelling the leaves.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Laibach has been accused of glorifying fascism in the past to which their response has been: ‘We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter.’ Which I assume means they are fascists, they’re just very, very bad at it.

John Oliver. “Laibach goes to North Korea,” Last Week Tonight #45 (7/19/15)

It’s been close to a century since Karl Radek popularized the concept of National Bolshevism. It was June of 1923, after the successful workers’ revolution in Russia and a failed one in Germany which ended the first World War. As the Secretary of the Third International—the Communist International or Comintern—Radek hoped to rally support and solidarity among disaffected German rightwing soldiers, veterans and rank-and-file nationalists for the besieged Soviet Union. The goal was to firm up an alliance between the German Reichswehr and the Russian Red Army, irrespective of the interests of their different working classes, and to this end Radek made an infamous speech in the Executive Committee of the Comintern called “Leo Schlageter: The Wanderer into the Void,” which was endorsed by both Stalin and Zinoviev. Radek praised Schlageter—a conservative WWI veteran who joined the German paramilitary Freikorps to suppress the German workers’ soviet revolution of 1918-19 and who then was executed for sabotage against the French occupation army of the Ruhr—as a national hero and argued that “[t]he insistence on the nation in Germany is a revolutionary act.”

Long before the present-day red-brown alliances in Russian politics, over a decade before the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact, Radek’s “Schlageter Line” imposed an opportunistic alliance between para-fascist ex-military types and Germany’s revolutionary leftwing working class via the ever-pliant German Communist Party, the KPD. This was a strategy of National Bolshevism for the KDP and the German working class, ultimately to defend the Soviet Union and further that country’s interest in an alliance with Germany. To seal this pact with the devil, KDP Zentrale shut down the insurrectionary Hamburg Uprising by the district KP Wasserkante on October 22, 1923. Radek and Trotsky quickly defended the decision to stop the insurrection by condemning the uprising as premature. What followed was nearly a decade of on again/off again collaboration between the KDP and the NSDAP in the streets and the Reichstag against the SDP-dominated Weimar Republic.

This attraction to National Bolshevism on Radek’s part came as much from his personal experiences in Moabit prison trying to convert reactionary German nationalists to Bolshevism as from his reading of two renegade Hamburg communists, Laufenberg and Wolffheim, who coined the term National Bolshevism. These national communists promoted the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat in the service of German nationalism, the formation of a German Red Army, and a German-Soviet nationalist-socialist alliance in an all-out war against the US and UK. Sound familiar? Radek’s temporary and purely tactical “Schlageter Line” was part of a shameful history of Soviet and KDP intransigence, sectarianism and double-dealing that ultimately delivered the German working class into the hands of the Nazi Party in power, much as the PCE’s (Spanish Communist Party) machinations and red terror finally betrayed the Spanish proletariat to the clutches of Franco. Radek’s contribution to this debacle was to legitimize, for the first time as an official representative of the Comintern, the synthesis of right and left, ultra-nationalism with revolutionary socialism in Germany, that was the prototype for the obsessions of fascism’s leftwing thereafter.

To be fair, there were plenty of left-leaning German fascists in the 1920s and 30s, both inside the Nazi Party (Röhm, Gregor and Otto Strasser) and outside (van den Bruck, Jünger, Niekisch). And had the concept of National Bolshevism not existed in Germany by 1923, circumstance would have contrived something analogous, mirroring a common argument made about Hitler. But the initial willingness on the part of the Bolsheviks to cultivate National Bolshevism in Germany came to bite the Left on its ass. (Victor Serge said of the Schlageter tactic: “It’s playing with fire—all right let’s play with fire!”) The ideal of a red-brown, Soviet-Nazi, Russian-German alliance has been a goal of leftwing fascism ever since. From the NSDAP breakaway Combat League of Revolutionary National Socialists through the ultra-Zionist, anti-imperialist LEHI (Stern Gang) in Mandated Palestine to the left Peronist FAR-Montoneros guerrillas in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” the archetypal synthesis of revolutionary left and right epitomized by National Bolshevism has recurred over and over, much like a periodic, virulent outbreak of herpes. Most recently, the anarcho/ultra milieu has witnessed @ publisher AK Press accuse white South African journalist, writer and AK author Michael Schmidt of being a secret National Anarchist in league with Troy Southgate.

AK Press did its due diligence, thoroughly investigated Schmidt’s background, and determined that the rumors of his involvement in National Anarchism were true despite his outward adherence to an odd-duck anarchist Platformism. So AK stopped publication of his current book, removed his previous books from its inventory, and disseminated its lengthy, damning findings as widely as it could in the anarcho/ultra milieu. Schmidt’s story is that he is an anarchist and a journalist who was engaged in legitimate research of fringe fascist elements, and that every fact dug up by his detractors has another more innocent explanation. I think that the evidence is overwhelming that Michael Schmidt is at present a National Anarchist-identified fascist. Now, I really don’t care whether Schmidt infiltrated anarchism with his authentic NA fascist beliefs intact or simply developed his decentralized, tribal white nationalism “organically” over his time in the anarchist movement. The purported synthesis of revolutionary left and right that is at the core of National Bolshevism, National Syndicalism, National Anarchism, National Autonomism, ad nauseam—what this fascist tendency likes to call metapolitics—is a clear enough political signature for folks on the Left and the left of the Left to help screen against infiltration or “entryism,” or even genuine conversion.

Well done.

The issue is not jurisprudence or a fair trial or innocent until proven guilty or incarceration. Libertarians forget that, in promoting voluntary association, they automatically authenticate voluntary disassociation; everything from caveat emptor to outright ostracism. The anarcho/ultra milieu is just that—a milieu—and not a community, so its ability to put social pressure to bear is limited. Nevertheless, the option exists and needs to be exercised.

The initial opportunism and sectarianism that marked Bolshevik Russia’s attempt to set up a German National Bolshevik sock puppet does not account for the ongoing opportunism and parasitism of this fascist tendency’s constant attempts to piggy back onto the Left. But neither does it set up some sort of equivalency between socialism and fascism. This is not an argument either from Hanna Arendt’s sophisticated if misguided thesis in The Origins of Totalitarianism or its dumbed down High School version that, if one travels far enough along the extremes of either political Left or Right one circles back around toward its supposed opposite, and thus that all political extremism is essentially the same. There are plenty of credible differences that make a true distinction between extreme Left and Right—libertarian and totalitarian—which I’ve covered in past columns. Unfortunately, this sophomoric understanding of politics persists, as does its flip side, a kneejerk contrarianism. So, when a mendacious former columnist proclaims on Facebook by analogy to the original American revolution that “This time it’s TWO royal families,” the Bushes and the Clintons, from which we must declare our independence by voting for either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, the sheer knuckle-dragging idiocy is breathtaking. He was never the sharpest tool in the shed, particularly when it’s clear there’s no exaggeration, hyperbole or parody intended in his political analysis, such as it is.

What is involved is a sentiment akin to épater la bourgeoisie, the rebellious, indiscriminate desire to stick it to the establishment, which needs to be critiqued. The post-Romantic Decadents of the fin de siècle were fond of skewering the cultural banality, economic regimentation and political conformity of the stodgy middle-class society of their day. In this they prefigured virtually every rebellious Bohemian youth culture that followed, from the wandervogel to punk rock. Michael “Bommi” Baumann expressed this best in How it all Began/Wie Alles Anfing when he wrote: “You still didn’t feel like part of the left; but everything that was in opposition was good, including the neo-Nazis. […] Fascism as such was in opposition though, and you found pure opposition better than this petit-bourgeois mediocrity. You considered everything good that didn’t agree with it.” Or, as Sean Aaberg of Pork Magazine crudely puts it in protesting what he considers our “increasingly uptight society,” his magazine’s rebellion for its own sake and swastika iconography is “not suitable for squares” and a way of “outing closet totalitarians.”

As for Laibach’s sly lampooning of similar left-right political lunacy, return to the postmodern angst which begins their song “Tanz Mit Laibach” and defines the épater les bourgeois motivating much fascist courting of the Left:

Tom and Ray Magliozzi of Car Talk fame did a bit where they bemoaned having to exercise regularly. If exercising a half hour every day adds up to a year of exercise in your life, one or the other of the Magliozzi brothers quipped, you’ll live just one year extra plus a day before you “buy the farm.”

So what if I said you could live longer with or without exercising more, without actually doing anything different than you’re doing now?

I drank alcohol regularly for 30 odd years prior to stopping completely on January 1, 2010. I wasn’t a fall down drunk, nor did I actually get wasted drunk, but I was a daily maintenance drinker. I drank until I got my buzz on. For that 30 years, when I wasn’t forced to go to work, I woke routinely around 9, 10 in the morning. After I stopped drinking I was depressed for another 9 months and so I continued to rise late in the morning, even though I retired and no longer had to work. That means I was sleeping 9 to 10 hours a night.

When I finally got on top of my depression, I resolved to curtail my sleep to a more normal 7-8 hours a night, meaning that I now wake at 7 or earlier most mornings. That’s 1 to 2 hours extra of wakefulness a day on average, which adds up to 15 to 30 more days of being awake each year.

No one knows the time of one’s death. Waking earlier doesn’t actually extend the date of one’s dying, but it does give one more time to be awake, and hence consciously alive. Plus, I wake up at a calmer, more peaceful time of my day. I feel like a get more done these days as well. That’s something.

Besides, I get to catch a sunrise now and then on my new schedule.

]]>https://gamatiasz.com/2016/02/02/how-to-live-longer/feed/0gamatiaszAppropriated from lollydaskal.com.